Thursday, March 1, 2012

March 1st

Michal Dragoun is a solving Grandmaster, an International Judge for helpmates and fairies, but also a very talented composer (GM in composing since Kobe 2012 WCCC). He published more than 1000 problems, of which 600 were awarded. He mostly composed helpmates, but a fair proportion of his works comprises fairy helpmates or helpselfmates. A quick search in a database shows he has won more than 220 prizes. He won the 2004-1006 Fairies WCCI and shared the 3rd place of the 2004-2006 Helpmates WCCI.

He was the editor of Šachová skladba. He was also the editor of the helpmate section of the Slovak magazine Pat a Mat, before Juraj Lörinc took over (by the way, the originals published in Pat a Mat can be seen on Jan Golha's site, along with their solutions).

Comment by Juraj Lörinc: 4 echo mates, one of them (Qd4) reappears after reciprocal blocks of bQ a bB. All mates use circe selfguarding of wQ and the whole difference is attained by different Circe squares under various Circe modifications

Manfred Rittirsch (01-03-1961) German composer and International Master

Manfred Rittirsch composes amazing fairy problems, often in collaboration with other German problemists.
For instance Torsten Linß presented on his website his joint compositions with Manfred [broken link].

Rashid Ponomaryov was a design engineer who, it seems, was one of the developers of tank T-34. He was also a Kazan chess composer and was very enthusiastic about promoting chess and chess composition, often gave lectures, presentations and was generally very supportive to young problemists. He published his first problem in 1936 and made a 35-year break in his composing career.
He composed in all genres: direct mates, helpmates, selfmates, series problems,